Today in funding ($25M): Resson, Unito, Xanadu

Three Canadian startups have announced fresh funding rounds to fuel their growth. Here’s the latest on who raised how much, and from whom.

Resson raises $14 million Series C with Mahindra & Mahindra

Fredericton-based Resson has raised a $14 million Series C with Indian car manufacturing firm Mahindra & Mahindra — which has 500 dealerships in North America — as a strategic partner.

The round includes existing strategic partners McCain Foods and Monsanto Growth Ventures, as well as existing investors Build Ventures, Rho Canada, BDC Capital, East Valley Ventures, and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

“Agriculture is an increasingly technology-intensive business, and Resson’s precision farming solutions will help growers get more yield from every acre,” said Rajesh Jejurikar, president of the farm equipment sector at Mahindra & Mahindra. “We are delighted to join McCain Foods Limited and Monsanto Growth Ventures as a strategic partner of Resson.”

Resson’s data analytics platform uses computer vision to help agricultural producers maximize production of crops like potatoes, spinach, and grapes. Using cameras mounted on tractors or drones, the Resson Agricultural Management and Analytics System (RAMAS) provides a dashboard view that includes insights on managing yields, crop inputs, and agronomy decisions.

“Our strategic partners have been critical to the development of our technology and our rapid growth over the last two years,” said Jeff Grammer, CEO of Resson. “With the addition of Mahindra & Mahindra, we will expand our understanding of predictive analytics to maximize yields and profits for growers.”

Resson is currently working in partnership with McCain Foods — its first customer — and McCain’s team of agronomists to test its technology in commercial potato farming environments.

Unito.io closes $2 million seed round

Montreal-based Unito.io has closed $2 million for its work management platform.

The round was led by Mistral Venture Partners, and includes Real Ventures, Social Capital, Tom Williams, YUL Ventures, and 500 Startups.

Unito.io syncs a company’s to-do lists and all of the context around them — such as assignees, attachments, comments, and due dates — across different tools used to manage team task lists, such as Asana, Jira, Trello, and GitHub.

The company will use the funding to expand its partnership support initiatives with platforms like Atlassian and Trello, expand to new markets, and hire talent.

“We partnered early on with them and they’ve delivered consistently ever since,” said Andre Hill, VP of strategy and solutions at Wrike. “Their product has been key in closing large accounts of thousands of users.”

The company says they are using the funding to build out its technology, which harnesses photons (particles of light) to perform complex computations. Xanadu is working on photonic quantum architecture that it says can solve problems in machine learning, chemistry, finance, sensing, and drug discovery.

“Xanadu’s approach is highly flexible and eminently suitable for performing tasks such as quantum simulation and quantum machine learning,” said Seth Lloyd, a professor at MIT and a pioneer of quantum computing. He’s joined as Xanadu’s chief scientific advisor. “This will allow the scaling up of quantum information processing to tens of thousands of quantum operations within the next few years.”

“We’ve been customer-driven and solutions-driven from day one,” said Christian Weedbrook, founder and CEO of Xanadu. “Our hardware and software are developed with direct input from forward-thinking businesses that understand the vast potential and benefits of embracing an inevitable quantum world, early on.”